Several folks are reporting NTFS issues with different Puppies at this time. Not sure I subscribe to the above rationale. Testing these distros on a Windoze machine is a fine idea, but it doesn't strike me as logical to save alien OS files on there. If folks like what they see, there might be much better options. Top of the list has to be Gparted Wdoze into oblivion, it isn't difficult even for neophytes. My experience of a range of ages and abilities is that folks finishing with the devil's OS once and for all makes them ecstatically happy! Alternatives, esp. if the machine in question is shared, include second HDs which are dirt cheap on eBay for the size demands of Puppy, caddies, USB sticks (mentioned above), external HDs, other solutions also available. Most of Puppies' finest attributes can be had within modest confines. Why not another -[ oh, yes, older! ] - piece of hardware from the local boot sale, neighbour's spoilt kids, in the loft/garage/under the bed, for example. Just what is it that folks want to do that needs another Echelon in this world! Anyone living within range is welcome to select from my retinue of entirely suitable machines, gratis. Or I'll build to their spec. at cost.
Slackware is the oldest continuously supported open distro and defers to many of the classic tenets of the genre; Slacko provides best-of-breed in the compact distro kennel.
It seems to do games, videos & musak editing, which, although not its prime directive, would normally be accomplished on larger machines/distros, games consoles, studio sets and the like.
Horses,courses.

Are people just saving their save files to a NTFS drive... or are they saving it to a drive that they use windows on? The reason I ask is that its possible windows (when running) is doing something with the safe file which is making it unreadable by puppy. Perhaps trying to move it when it tries to defrag, etc. If its just sitting on a dormant non OS ntfs drive, then the possible issues are different.
I've never saved a safe file to NTFS, so I cant answer either way._________________

Why it doesn't happen all the time is a mystery. Also, it should have been happening in previous 5.3 Puppies. But IIRC, jades had no problem in Slacko 533.

It's possible that 5.3.3 came out in the period when I didn't have a functioning hard drive on the Pentium D machine, so I wouldn't have been able to test it on an NTFS parition. I was mainly working off a USB stick. My current 5.3.3 saves are upgrades of ones from earlier versions. The only other 5.3x Puppy I've been testing from around that time was Wary, but that was on the K6 machine which doesn't have NTFS partitions on either of the drives (FAT32 Win98 parition, ext3 data partition and a couple of full installs on ext4).

I did manage to create functioning saves on some of the versions between 5.3.3 and 5.3.7.7 so I am a little confused - but that's probably normal for me when trying to test Puppy.

UPDATE:

Tested creating a new save on NTFS with Slacko 5.3.3, and as rcrsn51 suspected it had the same problems as I've seen with some but not all of this round of Slacko test builds. Wary 5.3.90 also had a seemingly faulty save in that it ran the initial setup dialogues again, but once it got to the desktop the icons and backdrop were intact._________________Zhaan - AMD K6 2 500, 512MB RAM, ATI Rage 128 VR. Full install Wary 5.5 HardInfo Report
Merlin - Core i5-4590, 8GB RAM, Radeon R9 270X. Slacko 5.7.0

OK, as promised, the results from testing of the prospective fix for the NTFS save problem.

All tests LiveCD with Slacko 5.3.7.7 non-PAE, pfix=ram and saved to 160GB NTFS parition with WinXP on. Drive defragmented and error checked in XP first. On pfix=ram boot at start of each test, deleted save from previous one where the name and location would be the same.

Test 1.

Accepted all defaults on initial QuickSetup screen. No other changes apart from changing some ROX options and copying the replacement rc.shutdown file from a memory stick after decompressing it. Chose Reboot, created save using all default options (so save to sda1, ext2, 512MB, non-encrypted and save on root of partition). Selected No when asked to copy SFS file. Save working after boot, checked rc.shutdown date, still 26th November 2012.

Test 2.
Chose following QuickSetup options:-

Locale: en_GB
UTF-8 off
Timezone: Europe/London
Hardware clock set to UTC: off
Keyboard: UK
Num-lock: on

Rest of test same as Test 1. First attempt had same save problem as reported before, and rc.shutdown dated 4th November 2012. Possible that I either forgot to copy rc.shutdown or dropped it in the wrong place on the failed attempt. Ran this another four times, producing working saves successfully. Last three attempts with a different name each time.

Test 3.
Encouraged by the previous successes, I went for a full setup this time. QuickSetup settings as for Test 2. Set up wireless networking with Frisbee, installed Flash Player, set up Opera and installed CUPS driver for Deskjet 720C. Copied new rc.shutdown and chose reboot. Save file options were for 512MB unencrypted ext4 save in directory PuppyFiles on sda1. Boot completed without any problems and everything was remembered.

Test 4.

As Test 4, but with the wireless set up with Network Wizard rather than Frisbee. Save worked first time after reboot.

To summarise, it looks like the altered rc.shutdown does solve the problem - provided, of course, that I make absolutely certain I did copy it before reboot. 01micko forgot to mention uncompressing the file before copying it but I realised I needed to do that straight away. A new test build with the fix incorporated could be useful now, even if it needs to go back to being a beta rather than an RC._________________Zhaan - AMD K6 2 500, 512MB RAM, ATI Rage 128 VR. Full install Wary 5.5 HardInfo Report
Merlin - Core i5-4590, 8GB RAM, Radeon R9 270X. Slacko 5.7.0

Since your tests seem positive the next will be RC2. It's not a big change, only a couple of lines of code and it fixes a bug. I should have made it a .pet to make it easier for you to test.

Regarding your connection, Frisbee has an option that keeps the connection up if it's flakey. I have never used it but I believe you can set it up to 15 seconds. The daemon that is responsible for this has been patched in Slacko to accommodate that feature of Frisbee. It is designed to help in your particular situation. I'll have to add that to the release notes so at least it's documented.

The only thing you left out was the need to decompress the .gz file, but I'd been working with .gz files recenty so knew how they worked. You gave the rest of required info. I'm equally as likely to forget to install a pet as I am to copy a file to a given location.

01micko wrote:

Regarding your connection, Frisbee has an option that keeps the connection up if it's flakey. I have never used it but I believe you can set it up to 15 seconds. The daemon that is responsible for this has been patched in Slacko to accommodate that feature of Frisbee. It is designed to help in your particular situation. I'll have to add that to the release notes so at least it's documented.

I'll give it a shot. It's probably an odd firmware issue. Where Frisbee does score over using Network Wizard when the connection seems to have dropped is that the former has a nice "Reset Connection" button. On the latter, I have to load the profile again and then go and enter the IP address details again.

To access it you must click the "Wireless Diagnostics" tab in the main GUI. You are then presented with a row of buttons at the bottom of the GUI. There is one there (sorry forget the label ) but it is self explanatory. Click it and you get a box popping up asking you to enter the number of seconds before being disconnected. The default is 15. Leave it at that and see if if it makes a difference for your situation.

As far as you dmesg goes, I see a lot of activity regarding wlan0, but no critical errors as such. Rather peculiar.

As far as you dmesg goes, I see a lot of activity regarding wlan0, but no critical errors as such. Rather peculiar.

Rather! The really odd thing is that the network icon on the taskbar still shows that it's connected even though nothing's happening. Is there any chance of you including v. 1.9.6 of carl9170 in RC2? It might not fix the problem but it could be worth a shot._________________Zhaan - AMD K6 2 500, 512MB RAM, ATI Rage 128 VR. Full install Wary 5.5 HardInfo Report
Merlin - Core i5-4590, 8GB RAM, Radeon R9 270X. Slacko 5.7.0